1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an evaporator with a cool storage function.
2. Discussion of the Background
In recent years, in order to protect the environment and improve fuel consumption of automobiles, there has been proposed an automobile designed to automatically stop the engine when the automobile stops, for example, to wait for a traffic light to change.
However, an ordinary car air conditioner has a problem in that, when an engine of an automobile in which the air conditioner is mounted is stopped, a compressor driven by the engine is stopped, and supply of refrigerant to an evaporator stops, whereby the cooling capacity of the air conditioner drops sharply.
As one measure to solve such a problem, imparting a cool storage function to the evaporator has been considered, to thereby enable cooling of a vehicle compartment by releasing the cool stored in the evaporator, when the compressor stops as a result of stoppage of the engine.
The present applicant has proposed an evaporator with a cool storage function (see Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open (kokai) No. 2010-149814). In the proposed evaporator, a plurality of tube sets each including two flat refrigerant flow tubes whose longitudinal direction coincides with the vertical direction, whose width direction coincides with an air-passing direction, and which are spaced from each other in the air-passing direction are disposed in parallel such that the tube sets are spaced from one another in the thickness direction of the refrigerant flow tubes so as to form clearances each provided between adjacent tube sets. Cool storage material containers containing a cool storage material are disposed in some of the clearances such that each storage material container extends across all the refrigerant flow tubes of the corresponding tube sets. Each cool storage material container has a container main body portion joined to the corresponding refrigerant flow tubes. A plurality of convex portion rows are disposed on each of the left and right side walls of the container main body portion of each cool storage material container such that convex portion rows are spaced from one another in the air-passing direction. Each convex portion row includes a plurality of convex portions which are formed on the left or right side wall such that they are spaced from one another in the vertical direction, which protrude outward, and which are in contact with the corresponding refrigerant flow tube. The length of each convex portion is smaller than the width of the cool storage material container as measured in the air-passing direction, and each convex portion slopes toward to the windward side from the upper end toward the lower end thereof.